AlterNet.org: Bob Edgarhttp://www.alternet.org/authors/bob-edgar
enCommon Cause Sues To Restore Majority Rule To U.S. Senatehttp://www.alternet.org/story/155430/common_cause_sues_to_restore_majority_rule_to_u.s._senate
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<div class="field field-name-field-teaser field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">It is time to return to majority rule in the U.S. Senate--not 60-vote hurdles to end filibusters before voting.</div></div></div>
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<!--smart_paging_autop_filter--><p>I spent 12 of the most interesting years of my life in Congress and I grew to love the place. I was fortunate to work with people of good will and good ideas in both political parties; service was particularly satisfying when we were able to cross Washington's partisan divide to help move the country forward.</p>
<p>Sadly, those moments are rare these days. Ideological purists in both parties appear to have taken control of Congress and of the national dialogue. Voices of moderation and conciliation are being drowned out on the airwaves and inside the Capitol; critical problems are going unaddressed.</p>
<p>Things are especially bad in the Senate. Both parties have figured out that the minority, currently the Republicans, can use the filibuster rule to pretty much shut the place down.</p>
<p>Here's how the obstructionists work. To begin debate on a bill, senators must first adopt a "motion to proceed." But debate on that motion, as on most everything else that comes before the Senate, is unlimited unless at least 60 senators vote to end it. That means a minority of as few as 41 can block any action simply by refusing to permit a vote on the motion to proceed.</p>
<p>Thus the filibuster does not extend debate -- its supposed purpose -- it stops debate. In recent years, filibusters have prevented senators from acting on presidential nominations for judgeships and other offices, as well as bills to hold down interest rates on student loans, force the rich to pay their fair share in income taxes, and end tax subsidies to oil companies. Rather than debating bills and exchanging ideas on the floor, in view of the public and press, senators are pushed by the filibuster into back room deal-making sessions to get a vote on even the most routine legislation.<br /><br />
When the 111th Congress opened last year, the filibuster rule even denied my friend Sen. Tom Udall a chance to make the case for filibuster reform to his colleagues; the minority used the filibuster rule to block discussion on Udall's proposal to change the rule.</p>
<p>Simply put, that's unacceptable. It's an affront to our democracy and not the way the Senate was supposed to work. And it has real consequences for real people.</p>
<p>That's why Common Cause filed suit on Monday to stop it.</p>
<p>Our lawsuit argues that the Constitution sets out super-majority requirements only in special cases, to override a presidential veto or ratify a treaty, for example. It does not permit the Senate to require more than a simple majority just to begin debate; and the Supreme Court already has said that a legislative body's rules cannot conflict with the Constitution.</p>
<p>Congressional plaintiffs in our suit include Reps. John Lewis, D-GA, Michael Michaud, D-ME, Hank Johnson, D-GA, and Keith Ellison, D-MN.</p>
<p>Our other plaintiffs are three young people who recently put themselves through college, graduating with honors, after being brought to America by immigrant parents. They are eager to assume the rights and responsibilities of adulthood and of U.S. citizenship; one even wants to join the brave Americans who daily put their lives on the line in the Marine Corps.</p>
<p>But their path ahead has been blocked by the Senate's refusal to debate and vote on a bill, the DREAM Act, that has passed the House and is supported by a majority of senators.</p>
<p>The filibuster also is denying justice to tens of thousands of Americans. Twelve of President Obama's nominees for vacant federal judgeships, all with bipartisan support and nominated in states where the backlog of pending cases is so large that court administrators have declared a "judicial emergency," are being kept off the Senate floor by filibustering senators.</p>
<p>We had hoped that an agreement worked out by Sens. Reid and McConnell, the Senate Democratic and Republican leaders, at the beginning of this Congress in January 2011 would go a long way toward solving the filibuster problem. The Reid/McConnell arrangement has had little effect however, and the Senate remains too often hamstrung.</p>
<p>Open and at times extended debates are a Senate tradition worth preserving. There is no basis for the claims, made by some filibuster defenders, that reform of the filibuster rule would permit the majority in the Senate to run roughshod over the minority. In today's Senate, it's the few who are running roughshod over the American people. If the Senate won't address the problem, the courts must.</p> <!-- All divs have been put onto one line because of whitespace issues when rendered inline in browsers -->
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Tue, 15 May 2012 05:00:01 -0700Bob Edgar, Common Cause670783 at http://www.alternet.orgNews & PoliticsNews & Politicsu.s. senatecommon causefillibustermajority ruleconstitutional governmentbob edgarLet's Put an End to Political Blustering in the Senate, and Kill the Filibusterhttp://www.alternet.org/story/149135/let%27s_put_an_end_to_political_blustering_in_the_senate%2C_and_kill_the_filibuster
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<div class="field field-name-field-teaser field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">It&#039;s time for senators to end the politics of gridlock and reform the rules so a small minority cannot block the will of the majority.</div></div></div>
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<!--smart_paging_autop_filter--><p>In America's early days, a filibuster was a pirate -- "filibustero" in the original Spanish -- a soldier of fortune who plundered foreign lands without his government's consent.</p>
<p>Today's filibusteros wear $500 suits and carry BlackBerries, not cutlasses, on their belts. We call them senators. The piracy continues however, now legalized and directed at our own government.</p>
<p><a target="_hplink" href="http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1210/45796.html">Last week, 42 Senate filibusteros demanded a $700 billion ransom</a>, in the form of a tax cut for the richest Americans, and promised that nothing -- however important it might be -- will emerge from the Senate until they get it. Their piracy almost certainly will succeed, to be followed by more of the same. And the pirates will smugly insist that the filibuster is part of a great democratic tradition.</p>
<p>Aaargh!</p>
<p>The fact is that the modern filibuster, through which one senator or a handful can kill legislation by talking, talking, talking so long that the majority gives up and moves on to something else, has never been part of the Constitution or any law. It's not even in the original rules of the Senate.</p>
<p>You could almost say it's an accident.</p>
<p>America's founders fancied the Senate as a place for careful, thorough deliberation, in contrast to the more mercurial, close-to-the-people House of Representatives. George Washington is said to have described the Senate as the saucer where the passions of the day were poured out like scalded coffee to cool.</p>
<p>The first senators considered themselves gentlemen and so were loath to end discussion of any of the Senate's business until everyone had a chance to be heard. Still, the original Senate rules included a mechanism to end debate and force action by a simple majority vote.</p>
<p>It was rarely used. Leaving the vice presidency in 1805, Aaron Burr noted that he'd presided over only one vote to cut off debate during his four years in the chair. In 1806, senators decided that the rule permitting a motion to end debate was unneeded and eliminated it. The move enabled a single senator to block action by the entire body.</p>
<p>Still, the first real filibuster didn't come for another 35 years, in 1841, and there were only 32 more in 76 years after that.</p>
<p>In 1917, after a filibuster blocked President Woodrow Wilson's bill to arm American merchant ships threatened by the German navy, the Senate finally agreed to permit limits on debate, changing the rules to allow a cutoff, or cloture, on the vote of a two-thirds majority. The threshold was lowered to a three-fifths majority, now 60 senators, in 1975.</p>
<p>Not until the 1980s, 90s and the current decade, did filibusters become a popular parliamentary tactic. Democrats and Republicans alike now characterize them as a critical check on the excesses of the majority, a tool that forces both sides to compromise so that legislation can move forward.</p>
<p>It sounds good, but in today's hyper-partisan Senate it just isn't true. Today's filibusters actually stifle debate rather than extend it, block compromise rather than encourage it. Here's how.</p>
<p>Everything the Senate does, even the decision to consider a particular bill on a particular day, requires a vote. That means the decision can be filibustered.</p>
<p>In September, Republicans opposed to President Obama's plan to let gays serve openly in the military filibustered a motion to begin debate on legislation ending the current "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy. When cloture failed, the Senate was effectively blocked from taking up "Don't Ask" or amendments to the policy that might have produced a compromise. The only debate was over debating itself.</p>
<p>This happens with depressing regularity. Just this year, 41 Republican senators -- the minimum needed to defeat a cloture motion and keep a filibuster alive -- have blocked or delayed action in the Senate 125 times.</p>
<p>Other legislation has been blocked just by the threat of a filibuster. The START treaty, a new arms control agreement with Russia endorsed by secretaries of state from Henry Kissinger through Hillary Clinton is hanging by a thread in the Senate this month because of a filibuster threat by a single senator, Arizona Republican John Kyl. On a personal note, I've spent a good part of my life studying and working on arms control issues; it staggers me to see a senator use a parliamentary gimmick to block action on a treaty that helps protect our planet from annihilation.</p>
<p>"The democratic principle of majority rule does not apply in the United States Senate," Atlanta lawyer Emmet J. Bondurant observed in a paper prepared for Common Cause earlier this year. "Majority rule has been replaced in the Senate by minority rule."</p>
<p>The filibuster, at least as currently practiced, is unconstitutional and un-American. It's time for senators to end the piracy and reform the rules so a small minority cannot block the will of the majority. The Senate will have that opportunity in January, when it sets new rules at the start of the 112th Congress, and <a target="_hplink" href="http://www.commoncause.org/siteapps/advocacy/ActionItem.aspx?c=dkLNK1MQIwG&amp;b=5936779&amp;utm_medium=HP&amp;utm_campaign=Filibuster&amp;utm_source=SM">should do so</a>.</p> <!-- All divs have been put onto one line because of whitespace issues when rendered inline in browsers -->
<div class="field field-name-field-bio field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <!--smart_paging_autop_filter-->Bob Edgar is President and CEO of <a href="http://commoncause.org">Common Cause</a>. </div></div></div>
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Thu, 09 Dec 2010 13:00:01 -0800Bob Edgar, AlterNet664489 at http://www.alternet.orgNews & PoliticsNews & Politicsdemocratsgopsenatefilibuster